All Forum Posts by: John Lenhart

Nick - PM me about your deal size, etc. and I can let you know a list of people who would be good in the area. I know a few good title agencies and attorney's I can recommend in the area.

I am a fan of CIncinnati Coin and use them for some of my larger properties but

If you are looking to buy your own, I recommend the refurbished Maytag machines that Great Lakes sells. As mentioned they run about $500 per unit and have a coin drop instead of a coin slide. This makes it much easier to change the prices on the machines. Do not get one with a coin slide because they are difficult to raise prices

I use Cinti coin in some of my buildings larger than 4 families. I did not know they service 4 families. In some of our 4 families we purchased refurbished machines from Great Lakes Commercial or (Wash). They typically cost $500 a piece. The good news is you get all the revenue but the downside is that they are slow to service your machines if they do not own them.

@Dave Foster thank you for your thoughts. are there any other strategies that be done to use 1031 funds but at the same time shielding the sale price from the county so as not to trigger a sharp re-valuation of taxes?

Would it be possible to have the seller retain a partial ownership interest in the property as a TIC and then have them essentially phase out their ownership interest over a period? (i.e. create a new LLC whereby purchaser takes % interest and seller remains % owner and then the seller essentially diminishes their interest over a certain period)?

Given the elevated pricing going on today, is it possible to reap the tax deferment of a 1031 exchange while still doing an entity transfer in order to save on taking a huge property tax hit on the replacement property?  I know that you typically cannot do this because of classification issues (real estate for an entity interest) but is there a back door way to accomplish this type of strategy?

@Kris Benson I don't mean to sound rude, as I agree with everything you say about self storage, but there is a pretty active community discussing self storage on these forums. No, it is not apartments or single family housing rentals, and never will be. That is because there are a lot more of that property class out there, plus the pool of commercial investors is also smaller.

If you read through the forums, Self Storage, especially lately is probably the 3rd most talked about asset class outside of apartments and single family. Lately, it has been more active than Mobile Homes, hotel, industrial on the forums. Point being, there are people talking about it

There are even blog posts out there dealing with self storage.

It would be beneficial to help build this up on BP,  and I am all for more discussion on this topic but it is an actively discussed asset class on these forums already.

For smaller properties we use Jerry Garrison, good for 2-10 plus units. 

Looking for larger properties I like 

Kurt shoemaker at Cbre

Nick Andrews at Marcus Millichap

Steve Turman with IPA is good for dealing with the 20-70 unit size

Greg Vollman is another one in the 20-70 unit range.

What size property are you looking for? We may be willing to part with some 4 families in our portfolio in the coming months.

@Wendy Carpenter PTI is a good name in the industry and we have used the Falcon software. It is a bit on the higher end and their software support service package is an additional expense. We prefer the Sentinel product ourselves because the software is included as part of the purchase and it is a bit more economical. 

I highly recommend one that integrates with your management software. When we purchased our first facility, the keypad was not compatible for the property management system and we had to manually enter and remove codes. It made it easy to forget to take them out on move outs and there were a lot of duplicate and expired codes in there before we switched systems.

@Ray Loveless - What are your investment goals? Are you looking for yield, appreciation, or some combination. 

If you are looking for yield, then Cleveland and Detroit and even Dayton Ohio are great options. In fact, if you are looking solely for yield, that is where you want to be investing.  You will get a great cash return in those cities. Now, the flip side is that I would not expect much price appreciation on the exit.

If you invest on the coasts, I am sure you will find that the yield sucks but if you hold on for a few years, hopefully you can make a return on the price appreciation. (personally not my cup of tea)

There are numerous cities in the Midwest that offer a mix of yield vs return. Louisville, Columbus, Cincinnati, Milwaukee you can get a good yield and some price appreciation.

I think you should probably check out some stuff from Scott Meyers. He is the expert as far as you self storage questions go from development to sale